I'm slowly getting various things planted in the garden, notably the cool-weather stuff that can handle spring temperatures. Last week I planted potatoes.
Unlike last year, when I planted eight beds and harvested 230 pounds of potatoes, I'm limiting our potatoes this year to just three beds. That's because we are still swimming in potatoes and don't need eight more beds' worth.
I had already layered compost on the beds from a couple weeks earlier, so all I had to do was turn it over (which takes just a couple of minutes per bed).
Lots and lots of worms, always a nice thing to see.
We were pressed into using this space as an impromptu root cellar, and to be honest it's worked out amazingly well. In previous years, without a dedicated place to store potatoes over the winter, they were ridiculously overgrown by April – fine for planting, but not for eating.
But last year's potatoes – and remember, we still have lots – are still in excellent shape, even after six months in storage.
For planting, I brought out the burlap sack that contained the smallest potatoes, which I used as seed potatoes.
I arranged three rows of seven potatoes each, for a total of 21 potatoes per bed, or 63 total potatoes.
Using a trowel, it doesn't take long to bury each potato deeply.
That's as far as I got last week, and ever since then we've been dodging some fairly major rainstorms.
With more rain on the way, the one thing I hadn't yet done was put straw mulch on the beds.
Mulching takes no time at all.
Mr. Darcy supervised the process.
Except for a little light weeding (notably, of the volunteer wheat that will grow from the wheat-straw mulch) – and watering, of course – that's all I'll need to do to the potatoes until October, when I'll harvest them.
It's a good thing I got the mulching done when I did, since we had a dramatic bit of rain move through today.
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